Just before the MySQL User Conference, Dups implemented a small little feature for Planet MySQL: “voting”. We wanted to see what a voting system might mean to you, our PlanetMySQL readers.

The question is now how to improve the voting mechanism to make it more useful. The goal is for everyone to see what you and your peers think are the best PlanetMySQL entries over a given week.

Here are some of the options:

1. Open up voting to everyone regardless of whether they are logged in or not. Currently you can only vote if you are logged in with a MySQL.com account. Let’s face it, a login gives a barrier to entry even as

A new start always provides an opportunity to reassess your way of doing things:

• “Am I doing the right things with my life?”
• “Which habits could I change — in order to be a better neighbour?” 

Since Karen Tegan Padir took over the MySQL product from Mårten Mickos, we at Sun have taken a thorough look in the mirror.  The result of this introspection allows us to publish our conclusions and new community commitments this week in conjunction with the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara. 

For those who don’t yet know Karen, let me state a few facts: 

• Karen is VP of Sun’s newly-founded MySQL & Software Infrastructure group
• She describes herself as a geek and a

Jetlagged from transatlantic travel, I woke up in the middle of the Californian night thinking about what has changed since I arrived at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on Sunday evening. I was pondering all the questions MySQL users and Sun colleagues were asking at the event, and what the user base was thinking out loud on Twitter yesterday.

What has changed is obviously that Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun.

What further changes we will see as a

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations,

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is coming, and for downloading, it’s already available, as I hope you have noticed from Giuseppe’s blog. We continue our preparations, this time by announcing Position 2 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

2. Guy Adams (Parallel Ltd., Milton Keynes, United Kingdom): Using Partitioning to Manage Satellite Networks. See Guy’s DevZone article.

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is getting closer by the minute! So it’s time for Position 3 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

3. Corrado Pandiani (Football Club Internazionale Milano Spa, Milan, Italy): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler for online logging & real-time stats. See Corrado’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Corrado! I hope you are in a position to take

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is close, so close that we’re seeding the mirrors (I hope you noted Giuseppe’s blog entry)! So it’s time for Position 4 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

4. Volker Oboda (TeamDrive Systems GmbH, Hamburg, Germany): Using the Pluggable API for TeamDrive. See Volker’s DevZone article, and

Do you read German? Then I have two recommendations for you.

First, go read this fresh interview with the German social networking guru Klaus Eck. It’s about “a life long job application process”.

Second, go read the book “Karrierefalle Internet” (”Career trap: Internet”) by Klaus Eck. That book is what

phpMyAdmin and MySQL Forge, along with the MySQL Build Farm initiative were the main MySQL related benefactors of Google Summer of Code 2008. phpMyAdmin got BLOB Streaming support and a simplified setup script, MySQL Forge got RSS and Atom feeds and the MySQL Build Farm got a test schedule.

Directly mentored by phpMyAdmin originator Marc Delisle, GSoC student Raj Kissu Rajandran completed the BLOB streaming support in phpMyAdmin. This is how he describes his project goals (which are now achieved):

It is often common to come across a website, especially a blog, that is built

Three weeks ago, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and the second one was Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

This time, I’m taking a look at Facebook. As I said in the first (Dopplr related)

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and

Simon Phipps yesterday blogged about the emerging Sun Model for Open Source business:

As time has gone by, a clear “Sun Model” for open source business has been emerging, at least to my eyes. The summary of it is:

remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;

encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;

deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

Each software team at Sun

To understand a bit of Italian, I just need a comparatively small amount of vino bianco. By contrast, to get any information flow going at all in Russian requires larger amounts of … preparation. That doesn’t have to be vodka, it can also be interesting discussions with Russians, or the opportunity to give a speech.

Now, a blog is the scalable way to interact with the rest of humanity, and I’m trying to increase my fluency in all things Web 2.0. So, here goes, may I present my Russian blog:

Like in the case of presenting my Italian blog, let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my

Given that I don’t speak Italian, it may seem a bit strange that I just started an Italian language blog on http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/:

But I do have a point with my blog. Let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

“So, I suppose MySQL’s main competitor is Oracle?” is a frequent question I get asked by the press. “Well, we don’t really compete heads-on with other databases. We co-exist! Just as an example: Over a third of respondents in an Oracle User Group survey said they also use MySQL”, I answer.

The reporter then continues “But everyone has a main competitor. Don’t you plan for people to migrate from Oracle to MySQL?”. I continue with “Not really. Migrations do happen, but not all that often. MySQL tends to be used in new applications.”

“But surely you must have some competitive atmosphere, or equivalent feelings towards Oracle.”

Today is Good News Day. In addition to my note on Ivan Nikitin’s improved health, I have good news for our current and potential code contributors:

We have moved from having used MySQL AB’s own Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to now using the Sun’s Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is shorter and easier.

I’ve been asked about our contributor licensing on several occasions, such as back in July, at MySQL Camp in Bangalore, India, as Parvesh

Within minutes after Finland was just about to win 3:2 over Germany in the football world championship qualifications (but it ended 3:3), I got a bit of consolation for myself, my dual-citizenship son cheering for Finland, and my fellow countrymen using MySQL:

We have the next MySQL 5.1 Use Case article live, and it’s about FC Inter Milan. No Finns playing there (but stars such as Ibrahimovic, Materazzi, Luis Figo, and Adriano). And, from a MySQL perspective, the interesting point is that FC Inter Milan is using both MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and the Event Scheduler in an innovative way.

Tomorrow, there’s a particularly interesting MySQL University session coming up: The OpenSolaris Web Stack.

This session is presented by key experts outside the Database Group, but inside Sun:

• Jyri Virkki, lead for OpenSolaris Web Stack community, Sun Microsystems
• Murthy Chintalapati, Web Stack development, Sr Engineering Manager, Sun Microsystems

For practical reasons, this session happens three hours later than normal. To decipher that into a timezone which may be familiar

Innovation Everywhere! That’s the motto of the MySQL Conference & Expo 20-23 April 2009, in Santa Clara.

If April next year sounds like the distant future to you, then you’re evidently not planning to be a presenter. Since if you do plan to present, there’s a very close date relevant for you: 22 October 2008. That’s when the Call for Papers closes.

If you’re an innocent bystander and don’t plan on presenting, you may still enjoy lurking at the MySQL Conference Website, for instance looking at some of the

We timed our Use Case Competition to coincide with summer holidays, and are now prolonging the duration of the Use Case Competition with one month, until 30 September 2008.

To recap, here’s the original posting (with an updated deadline):

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 30 September 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

In an internal mail thread, I was asked whether there would be any “objections from an integration perspective” to some Sun initiated plans for a more organised French MySQL community.

My reply was that it’s great, if it’s something related to the self-organisation of the already very active French MySQL community (as witnessed for instance by the huge numbers that Véronique Loquet of Al’x Communication attracted to our Paris meetup in April). But if it’s about a centrally-imposed structure of “marketing towards the user base”, then I want to understand more and we need to discuss a bit further.

Here’s an update on Ivan’s status, both from a medical and contributions perspective. Three days ago, I wrote that Ivan has arrived in Germany. Instead of posting all my news on Ivan as new posting each time, I will at irregular intervals keep this page up to date.

Andrii, Ivan and the rest of the family have now started settling in in Heidelberg. Georg Richter has found an apartment for them close to the hospital, and they will move there in a few days.

The first round of tests and examinations (blood tests, bone marrow punctation) has been concluded, but I won’t share any speculations on this until we’ve got them confirmed. The examinations will continue, and

This blog entry is about a specific storage engine in MySQL. The Federated storage engine enables data to be accessed from a remote MySQL database on a local server without using replication or cluster technology. When using a Federated table, queries on the local server are automatically executed on the remote (federated) tables. No data is stored on the local tables.

When we released MySQL 5.1.24, the Federated engine was not compiled in, pending decisions on our future steps. The reason for the removal was that we realised (albeit quite late in the game) that Federated has some bugs that expose the server to unnecessary risks. Fixing these bugs is a time consuming process, because the root cause lies in the design of

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 31 August 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize:

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

We have migrated all MySQL code trees that were available in BitKeeper. This means not just current GA and development versions of MySQL Server and MySQL Cluster, but also the history all the way back to MySQL 3.23.22 released about eight years ago. And we’ve also migrated non-MySQL-server FOSS applications to Bazaar, such as MySQL Workbench (formerly not in

This blog posting has little to do with MySQL or Sun. It’s about experiences gathered while shuttling around the world as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, but it’s not about databases, it’s not about operating systems, nor computer languages: it’s about human languages, and how going beyond English provides a business advantage.

Let me try to grab your attention by first sharing my perhaps somewhat controversial conclusion:

English as a language of communication is much overrated. In an international setting, English may be sufficient for conveying meaning, but it has severe deficiencies when it comes to establishing a social relationship, to showing respect, to building trust, and to having fun.

Since meeting yesterday with Vladimir Voskresensky, a Sun colleague from St Petersburg, I have a new favourite answer to the request “so tell me an example of technical advantages resulting from Sun’s acquisition of MySQL“:

Using NetBeans as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for coding and learning MySQL.

Now, that’s a simple answer, and that’s because it’s a simple and beautiful thought. But let’s start from the beginning.

In my days as a coder, I enjoyed the command line. I’ve used various coding editors, and I’ve disliked the hassle

This year, we got fourteen Google Summer of Code projects accepted. Colin Charles has informed the students, and things can now get started!

The first step is what’s called the Community Bonding Period. That’s happening right now, and also being facilitated by Colin. Colin has written a summary of the Community Bonding period on the Forge Wiki, and there’s also a general description by Google.

We expect great things from the students. We want them to

There’s a reason for Sheeri winning the Community Advocate of the Year award. Her activity level is hard to beat.

If you want a chance to beat Sheeri for 2009, you need to master multitasking. Not only is Sheeri listening to Mårten presenting his keynote. She’s preparing for some vlogging, i.e. recording Mårten’s presentation. And she’s blogging at the same time. And (although she doesn’t know it until three seconds after the picture was taken) she’s getting ready for getting up on stage to receive her 2008 award.

Ah, myself I’m only listening, and taking the odd picture. (Some of them very odd).

Every year, there’s a task that is both difficult and pleasant at the same time: Picking three outstanding contributors from the MySQL Community. Mårten Mickos, MySQL’s former-CEO and Sun’s now-SVP of the Database Group, has just presented the results by handing out the 2008 MySQL Community Awards.

Rich Green, Diego Medina, Baron “xaprb” Schwartz, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral, Mårten Mickos at the award ceremony

This time, our choice fell upon these three community members, whose contributions we very much appreciate:

Code Contributor of the Year: Baron “Xaprb” Schwartz, for the Maatkit toolkit
From the creation of the most popular MySQL toolkit, Maatkit, to